PERSPECTIVES; A Middle-Income Housing Program Gathers Steam

RELAXED on a park bench a few days ago, Joseph Scarpinito looked across the street at the nearly complete apartment house he is building in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn and speculated on what might have happened on the site, but didn't.

''We were thinking it could have been a rehab, with 17 tax-credit or HOME units,'' he said. That's builder jargon for two forms of public subsidy used to build low-income housing. Until recently they were the primary mechanisms available for bringing public funds to bear in assisting multifamily rental construction anywhere in the city outside central Manhattan.

Usually the low-income programs are used to renovate existing buildings rather than build new ones. Any builder with a site that needs some public subsidy, however little, to be economically feasible, would have to tap into the low-income programs to build a multifamily rental.

The Scarpinito family, owners of JES Construction, a Brooklyn-based contractor-builder, would have been limited to rehabilitating an existing warehouse structure on the 22,000-square-foot site for low-income housing. It was large enough for only 17 apartments.

Instead, JES Construction has been able to demolish the old building and produce 52 apartments in a new eight-story building, called St. John's Apartments, at 287 Prospect Avenue. The site is off Sixth Avenue in the South Slope section of Park Slope, with St. John's Lutheran Church next door and the Prospect Expressway across the street.

The rents are $950 to $1,000 a month for the 30 one-bedroom apartments and $1,200 to $1,400 a month for the 22 two-bedroom two-bath apartments. Applicants, whose income must fall within certain ranges, are currently being interviewed at an on-site rental office. Occupancy will start in mid-October.

This outcome on the Scarpinito property is being replicated throughout middle-income neighborhoods of the city as a new program initiated by the city Housing Development Corporation moves into high gear. H.D.C. is a state-chartered public benefit corporation that provides bond financing for multifamily housing. Russell A. Harding became its president this year.

The first phase of the production program got under way last year with a $15 million subsidy from the corporation. Twelve construction projects have been initiated. Six of them are already being built and the rest are well advanced in the development pipeline. Seven of the 12 are from-the-ground-up new construction projects. Three are gut rehabilitations of existing but vacant residential buildings. And two are conversions of vacant nonresidential buildings in Brooklyn to housing use -- a former parochial school in Carroll Gardens and the former Clermont Armory in Fort Greene.

When completed the 12 projects will provide 930 new apartments at an estimated total development cost of $127 million.

The income guidelines under the program are so calculated that in principle a two-bedroom apartment with an allowable rent of $1,150 a month could be taken by a family of four earning as much as $105,600 a year. But in fact, because of the housing choices typically made by families of varying incomes, most tenants are likely to have earnings in the range of $35,000 to $70,000 a year.

The rent limits under the program are $800 a month for a studio apartment, $1,100 for a one-bedroom, $1,500 for a two-bedroom and $1,750 for a three-bedroom. The actual rents that builders charge, which reflect local housing markets, are normally lower than the allowable maximums by several hundred dollars a month. Occasionally they are a bit higher.

THE announcement of the program brought forth a number of developers who have previously done business with the Housing Development Corporation, had established a favorable track record and already had control of sites that were appropriate for multifamily development. They are in locations that do not require or justify the high public cost per housing unit that low-income subsidies provide.

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In the middle-income program the Housing Development Corporation subsidy is a maximum of $20,000 an apartment, provided by way of a second mortgage at 1 percent interest. The average in Phase 1 has been about $17,000 an apartment.

Using this subsidy in conjunction with taxable bonds issued by the corporation has given the projects the assurance of longterm mortgage debt at an interest rate of about 6 or 7 percent, Mr. Harding said. New buildings also get a 25-year tax abatement under the city's Section 421a abatement program, instead of the 15 years that is standard for conventionally financed multifamily buildings outside central Manhattan. Rehabilitations are eligible for the city's J-51 tax abatement.

As one result of all this, Bell Realty of Great Neck, L.I., decided to put a 122-unit apartment tower above the store it is building for Staples between 58th and 59th Street on Queens Boulevard in Woodside. The 70,000-square-foot site was to have been developed in the 80's with a 19-story condominium and a school, but the property fell into foreclosure.

''We had the foundation in place for a future tower, but without the middle-income program it would not have been built at this time,'' said Charles J. Belanich, a partner in the project. Completion is expected in a year.

Another result is that Cheever Development Corporation of Brooklyn, owned by the Lonuzzi family, and Community Developers, headed by Getz Obstfeld, former director of the Banana Kelly nonprofit housing development organization in the Bronx, have been able to move forward with a long-delayed project, the rehabilitation of the former St. Agnes parochial school, long vacant, in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn.

''We had tried to develop the building for housing for the elderly, but that wasn't successful because of the cost and the difficulty of adapting the building,'' said Mr. Obstfeld. ''The numbers worked perfectly for the H.D.C. program.'' It is a $10 million project that will create 90 apartments at 421 DeGraw Street, near Hoyt Street across the street from St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church. The construction loan closed in July and completion is scheduled for next summer.

In Queens, the Ciampa Organization is using the financing at the D. C. Colonnade, a new 60-unit building at 136-43 37th Avenue in downtown Flushing, a block from Main Street and Northern Boulevard. It is Ciampa's first new multifamily rental in 12 years, said Dominick Ciampa, a principal in the family-owned building company, which was founded in the 1920's. The project uses a subsidy of only $8,000 an apartment. Its rent schedule is accordingly a bit higher than most of the others.

IN the Rego Park section, the Bluestone Organization of Flushing will use the program for a 132-unit building at 65-90 Austin Street; Galaxy Construction of the Bronx will build a 110-unit project on West 238th Street, overlooking the Major Deegan Expressway in the Kingsbridge section; Leewood Development, based in Staten Island, will produce 74 apartments in a neighborhood of new homes known as Rainbow Hill, near the Staten Island Expressway.

And in the Baychester section of the Bronx, MacQuesten Development Corporation, based in Mount Vernon, N.Y., closed just a few days ago on the loan that will produce 67 garden-style apartments off Baychester Avenue. They are the first phase of what will be a 135-unit project in four contiguous four-story buildings. The two-acre site, now vacant, is bounded by Palmer Avenue, Tillotson Avenue and Given Avenue. The architect is DePasquale and Geremia Architects and Planners of Mount Vernon.

The rehabilitations of existing residential buildings involve the following properties: two vacant four-story buildings at 471 Vanderbilt Avenue and 12-18 Gates Avenue in Fort Greene, into 26 apartments; 39-07 208th Street in the Bayside section of Queens, also as 26 units; and seven buildings in Harlem -- on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and St. Nicholas Avenue between 118th and 120th Streets -- as 80 apartments.